Well last night APRIL 9th was my first night out with my new Sirius mount. I am a complete noob when it comes to a GEM but I felt confident since I had my trusty owners manual.

Earlier that day I aligned the polar finder scope...all good. I get set-up outside to try and do a polar and 2 star alignment and all is well.So I do my polar alignment deal and choose a star to align to and begin slewing...nothing, zip, nada! I'm looking at the star with my eyes but my scope is NOT. It is a good bit off.

Anyway, to make a long story short...I set the doggone date wrong!!! It was APRIL 9th not the 10th!!! I thought it was the 10th.

However, I did have a victory today of sorts. I managed to get my laptop and Cartes du Ciel running the scope.

Even better, I managed to do a "Remote Desktop" from my computer inside to the computer outside to control the mount. This might come in handy on chilly nights of imaging.

So, I just wanted to share my "Adventures in mount land". I felt like a fool after I tore everything down and realized that I had enetered the wrong date.

I am also curious to know if anyone else uses the "Remote Desktop" feature to link up with their laptop?

Very cool!! I'm sure there are a lot of folks that have done the same thing with the date or the time... location... I know I've done them all!!

I just finished configuring VNC to remote to my laptop, and hopefully will have tested it before next time I set up. I noticed that Starry Nights will probably have to be replaced with something a bit less overhead hungry, so maybe I'll give Cartes duCiel a shot...